2008 Woodie Awards
The Aviator Takes Flight, Falls Short
Gerhard Schneibel
Issue date: 2/9/05 Section: Arts and Entertainment
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Howard Hughes, the eccentric heir to a Texas fortune, is just coming into his own as a Hollywood director at the beginning of The Aviator. He seems to be having a good time dating Jean Harlow, played by Gwen Stefani, the young star of his new aviation movie, Hell's Angels, which is the most expensive movie made in history, and probably also the most grandiose.
The first example of what I don't like about the movie appears right at the beginning of the film. While Leonardo DiCaprio does a pretty good job portraying Howard Hughes as a pent up, diffused and exacting person, the problem lies in the ways the other characters are made to react to him.
Hughes is a man who takes over a string of enterprises, which range from the movie industry to an airline. Although he has enough money to put any failing company on life-support for an indefinite period of time, he ruins almost everything he touches just by being himself and by pushing his will over that of the people who know what they're talking about.
And how does he treat his employees? Terribly. He stalks around, yelling at them and making outrageous demands that will keep them away from their families for weeks. But this doesn't stop Scorsese from cuing up the music and plastering inspiration on their faces.
To me, that's where the film falls short. It goes to great lengths to capture Hughes' eccentricity as it deteriorates into insanity, but it builds him up to be a visionary, when, in fact, he has decidedly more money than vision.
Apart from that, The Aviator seems par for the course as far as Hollywood built-up-to-be-epic movies go. It runs almost three hours, like an epic, but the breadth of the content could be pared down to the typical ninety minutes without really damaging the end product.
Even so, it wouldn't be fair to say that the movie is all bad. Scorsese still comes off as a very talented director, deserving of respect.
To me, the area in which The Aviator really shines is the seamless way that it integrates the complexities of Howard Hughes into a very solid portrait of a time and place, namely Hollywood in the years before and just after World War II.
Granted, I wasn't there, but all the details seem to fit: flashbulbs, graft and swanky clubs. The environment of the movie accurately depicts our collective imaginations, and Scorsese does an excellent job of placing Hughes - who is a pretty difficult wildcard - right in the middle.
He does this not only through the overt behavior of Hughes, but also through subtleties which establish his condition but don't break the flow of the action.
I think that the best examples of these are the close-up shots of the food on the table during scenes set at important dinners. Cuts of rare beef and broiled fish can look really appalling, if you catch them from the right angle, and Scorsese does. Without ever detracting from the forward motion of the scenes, he gives the audience a taste of what Hughes is dealing with, and he establishes empathy for this man whose neurosis should probably never have crossed paths with the world in which he lives.
In short, The Aviator is a good movie for what it is. It's basically canned material which doesn't take many chances, stays on the surface and tells you what you want to hear.
But it's entertaining, it moves along and it places an interesting historical figure in the context of a time and place which is very different from our own.